He smiled a charming, melancholy smile, and made me think of those noble velvet gentlemen by Vandyck upon the walls of our state chambers, whom I would stand and look at hours together and make love with all my heart to when I was a little girl. To watch him smile and to hear him speaking like a most tender music, none could have discerned what his emotion was, unless one had the experience of a lifetime to bear upon his ways. And for myself, ’twas only the misgivings of my heart that told me he was in great pain.
“What is it that I’ve done, my lord?” cries I, feeling that he must have been furnished with a very highly coloured picture of my deeds.
“I gave my word to the King,” he answered me, “that I would succour his soldiers here at Cleeby for a night, and take the prisoner that they held into my keeping faithfully. Instead of that I send my maid to drug the sentry; I go out in a pair of carpet slippers in the middle of the night; I set a ladder up against the hayloft; I climb up there, and, by means of dropping through a trap into a manger, I get into the prisoner’s cell and let the prisoner out; I furnish that prisoner with a pistol; I disarm an officer of the King, and cause him to be shot severely in the knee, and enable the prisoner to escape. It is in this manner that I redeem my promise to the Government of His Majesty the King.”
“You, my lord!” cries I, aghast, and doubting whether he had the proper enjoyment of his mind. “Pray shatter those delusions! I, my lord—I, your daughter Bab, did that, and I can show you the wound upon my shoulder that I got.” And here I chanced to sneeze, and turned it into evidence.
“And that, my lord,” says I, “is the mortal cold I’ve caught from those carpet slippers. I put them on for fear of waking you, sir.”
“Bab,” says he, in a wooing voice, “was it you who made that promise to the King?”
“Certainly not,” says I, in triumph, “for do you suppose that I would have thus amused myself had I done so? I told the Captain I was a rebel from the first.”
“Then that confirms all that I have said,” says he, “and I have informed the Captain that you count for nothing in this matter, and ’twas I who let the prisoner out.”
“Which, under your pardon, you never did,” says I, misunderstanding him. “I took the risks and I’ll have the glory. ’Twill be published in the Courier that that audacious wretch Bab Gossiter let out a dangerous rebel in the middle of the night, at her father’s country seat, by outwitting nimbly a well-known officer of His Majesty. They will put me in a ballad, and sell ’em two a penny in the Strand. Sylvanus Urban will have a full and particular account of me in the Gentleman’s Magazine, and for a whole nine days I shall be as variously known as Joan of Arc or wicked Mrs. Molly Cutpurse.”
“But ’twill be said,” says he, “that Mrs. Rumour hath lied as usual, and that she hath been quite put out of countenance by the fact that the Earl of Longacre, her peerless ladyship’s papa, hath confessed in his own person to this treason; that he hath stood his trial upon it at Old Bailey; hath been found guilty, and therefore stands committed to the Tower.”